Posted on 05/30/2014 2:38:36 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
In case you’ve been living under a rock, Ta-Nehisi Coates has written a thing at The Atlantic making the case for reparations.
For some, reparations to African Americans for enslavement and state-sanctioned apartheid (more benignly known as “Jim Crow”) is a shocking case to make. I am a sociologist whose training has been, in part, with economists like Sandy Darity at Duke University and Darrick Hamilton at The New School. For Darity, Hamilton, and many other serious scholars of race, history, and inequality, the matter of reparations is anything but novel or shocking. Neither is it hyperbolic. There are real programs, with feasibility studies and implementation suggestions, and they move far beyond Coates’ call for a spiritual reckoning of the body politic. If you have never heard of them, that is likely by design. Few powerful persons or institutions have ever been willing to seriously put a reparations program before the American people.
But I wager that you have heard a lot about how education and opportunity can be, through hard work and moral fortitude, the path to greater equality for African Americans. In many ways, when the formerly enslaved asked first for a national program to redress the forced, free labor that made the United States the nation we know it to be, they were given schooling instead of redress; opportunity instead of compensation. It is an attitude that persists in our policy and our cultural lexicon. When the demand is for justice, we are most likely to respond with an appeal, instead, to fairness. And in no institution is that more clearly evident than education. There’s just one problem: It’s not good enough.....
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I don’t know the answer, but stop naming your kids “Ta-Nehisi”, stop stealing, stop doing drugs, stop living off of government handouts, and go get a job!....might be a start.
From her article: During difficult economic cycles, black workers and students should benefit from the flexibility of moving in and out of college as their life circumstances allow. Without that flexibility, every educational moment becomes a zero sum decision: “If I leave school this semester to take that job or care for a family member, I probably will never be able to return.”
Is there a law that prevents black students from going back to school once they leave for some reason or another? Are they not allowed to take a college course while working? Having to make those kinds of decisions certainly is nothing unique to blacks.
When you start talking about poverty and race, inevitably most folks fall back on the usual tropes: blacks should care more about school, go to college, increase their graduation rates, choose the right majors.
That is absolutely true. And for the paragraphs following, where she describes unemployment rates that are higher for blacks than whites who are equally educated--maybe the problem is the attitude, not the education? I can't imagine that a job seeker showing up to an interview with attitudes of victimhood, resentment, and racism is going to be the number one choice of employers.
At every level of schooling, classrooms, schools, and districts reward wealth and privilege.
No, they reward the attitudes that lead to wealth and privilege. Often, you find those attitudes in children of well-to-do families, because that was how they were raised--but not always. Even if you come from a poor family, the right attitude will help you succeed.
Reparations can do what education cannot do.
No. Giving reparations is like giving a jackpot, in some ways. Those receiving reparations will almost certainly squander the money, and end up in exactly the same situation they were in before the reparations. One could say that the constant hand-outs of welfare are a form of reparation--have they helped blacks (or anyone else) succeed? No--they have resulted in generations of people who have no clue how to be self-sufficient, and who blame everything on racism.
Not all PhDs are equal. While earning a STEM PhD is a great investment in one's career--the unemployment rate among people who hold a PhD in life sciences is about 1-2%--other PhDs reward a nice diploma to hang on the wall, the right to call oneself "Doctor", high student debts, and low employability. I think that this girl's PhD falls in the latter category. If she is actually looking to work after college, she would have been better off going for a STEM PhD and foregoing all the sociological racism studies.
Blacks can go back to Africa to live with the Blacks and Arabs who enslaved and sold them in the first place.
In addition to being a racist Tressie here is too stupid to be an idiot.
Hmmm...you seem to be claiming White Privilege!
America IS reparations.
‘African-Americans’ must be a pathetic lot.
Exactly when do blacks intend to start paying back all the trillions of dollars invested, reinvested, thrown at them that have been squandered? And when do they plan to start repaying society for their criminal activities, preferential treatment and countless idiotic lawsuits claiming discrimination?
This country has already paid out 17 trillion dollars in reparations.
This country already offers educational grants to the poor and minorities.
If that isn’t good enough, then obviously nothing will ever be.
Sometimes I think we should give them reparations, and when the money has been squandered, and they are still living in poverty and want still more, we can finally close the door on this by pointing out that we gave them exactly what they claimed to need and they blew it and there will be no more. Ever.
Gee, I wonder why?
Who are we going to pay reparations to, exactly?
Slavery ended at the end of the Civil War 1n 1865, just under a hundred years ago.
Everyone living then under slavery is long since dead and all are now equal in the eyes of the Lord.
Jim Crow ended 50 years ago 1964 with the passage of the Civil Rights Act so anyone who was an adult at the time effected by Jim Crow or racism is in their mid 60’s at the youngest and most are in their 70s to 80s.
We are now firmly in the Affirmative Action and Welfare Entitlements generation with the Gang Banger generation setting the stage for their coming ascendancy in the Black community.
It’s only fair...
“Stratification, experientially, empirically, suprantional, organizational arrangements, social domains, structural processes, research agenda, foundational, pedagogical, interpretive.”
I wonder how much she paid for all those expensive words?
I thought 20 acres and a mule was reparations.
I have some good black friends. If they accept “reparations” they won’t be any more. I suspect that will be a common sentiment.
Free government money.
rinse and repeat
Her essay is poorly written—that she has the opportunity at Duke shows how awful affirmative action really is. No white candidate that writes this poorly would ever be admitted to Duke.
Wow, I feel so guilty over my white privilege I will gladly make it up to every slave I have ever owned. ;-/
“The Senate last week finally approved the multi-billion-dollar funding for the Pigford II and Cobell settlements, which will allow the government to pay out claims to African-American farmers...”
“”We’ve got to stand up at some point and say, ‘We are not gonna pay slavery reparations in the United States Congress,’” he said. “That war’s been fought. That was over a century ago. That debt was paid for in blood and it was paid for in the blood of a lot of Yankees, especially. And there’s no reparations for the blood that paid for the sin of slavery. No one’s filing that claim”. -Rep Steven King
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.